Cultural Development

Arteria Mediterranea

Arteria Mediterranea is a cultural association based in Palermo, founded in 2009 by Vera Mormino (Vera Mor), who is its president and legal representative. Its aim is to promote research, dramaturgy, training and creation of contemporary performance languages related to movement practices with a focus on the language of contemporary circus and in the last 5 years also on the dissemination of the Feldenkrais® method as a tool for learning and self-knowledge through movement.

In Arteria’s vision, the medium is not a priority, (which, however, privileges the areas of contemporary dramaturgies linked to the body and movement) but the quality of how and what the medium in question conveys.

THE VISION OF ARTERIA MEDITERRANEA

For the choice of the name we are inspired by the definition of artery: the arteries (from the Greek ἀρτηρία, respiratory or blood anatomical canal  are blood vessels that arise from the ventricles and carry oxygen-rich blood away from the heart.

​If the artery in the human circulatory system has the very important function of bringing oxygen and nutrients to all the cells of the body from the heart to the peripheries, Arteria Mediterranea tries to place itself in the heart of the Mediterranean, in Palermo, as a channel of passage to convey vital flows and maintain the movement of encounter and communication between individuals, both if they are inhabitants or passing people of the area in question, as well as the arteries keep in motion all the components of the human body.

It aims to be a living and art space in the heart of the city where you can cultivate listening, presence, care for the self and the space that surrounds you, well-being and creativity, starting from different methodologies that investigate the body and movement, the basis of life and our action and our feeling in the world.

Since January 2020 Arteria Mediterranea, is based at Atelier 12, in Via Alloro 12, in the heart of the Arab district of Kalsa, in the historic center of the city of Palermo.

After 15 years of nomadic artistic life around the world, we have chosen to return to Palermo because it seems to us that the south of the world can be a fertile territory for creativity, precisely because where there is an institutional and economic absence or shortage, the conditions are created to develop urgent responses from below; sometimes it is here that fertile examples of innovation are born. Here, where like wild and spontaneous grasses we take possession of a space in the middle, excluded, abandoned, or instrumentalised, composing life and experimenting with new forms of coexistence and resistance to abandonment.

Palermo, which has always been characterised by being a meeting place for diversity, in this sense is the ideal headquarter for Arteria Mediterranea as an interesting field of study in terms of contamination, welcome and cultural hybridity, tangible proof that integration and coexistence of diversity is possible and can produce vitality and beauty.

The Logo

An A dominated by a Sicily, embodied by the wings of the mediterranean butterfly Vanessa Cardui.

A becomes for us a graphic sign very dense of meanings

​

A

Art

Artery

Atelier

Air

Acrobatics

Aerial

Accoglienza (accomodation, hospitality, welcoming)

Awareness (Through Movement)

Alloro (Laurel, our street’s name)

Anarchy

Altro (Other)

Amore (Love)

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We wanted to translate Sicily through the concrete metaphor of the Vanessa Cardui, a migratory butterfly par excellence, typical of the Mediterranean area, which with its thousands of flying kilometers traveled every year between Africa and Scandinavia reminds us with lightness and tenacity that there is no life without movement, and no life without crossing borders and diversity’s encounter

Circo

Among the various methodologies that cross “the Artery” there is the art of diversity par excellence: the circus.

Among the various methodologies that cross “the Artery” there is the art of diversity par excellence: the circus.

The circus is an artistic language that uses the body to convey feelings, relationships, desires, fears, frailties, balances, imbalances, hardships and more, so its fruition is possible  both for inexperienced eyes and for more mature people:  It could talk to everyone.

The circus draws its strength from the art of knowing how to speak through metaphors and oppositions:

It is a metaphor par excellence of the contrast between archetypal opposing tensions of humanity: verticality, the yearning for the superhuman, the impossibility of escaping gravity, falling, failure, an inevitable condition of human frailty which lives on its paradox: the constant drive to elevation and to cross boundaries.

Circus can talk about divine through gravity, about fragility through force, about lightness through weight, about impossibility through the possible, about folly through discipline, about collectivity through individuality. Circus opens up extraordinary possibilities for the ordinary.  Circus is therefore a universal language because it does not use language, but it is the language of the metaphor of themes dear to the existence of man whatever its origin, and culture.

 Circus has a universal character as universal are the needs, fears and desires of man in every place of the world

 Circus is research for balance in situations of imbalance to which we are universally subjected; standing upright is already an attempt to counteract gravity, the universal situation to which the human condition undergoes

METODO FELDENKRAIS®

Another chosen methodology by us  is Feldenkrais, a method of learning through movement that is in our vision also perceived as a political tool, as a space for negotiation between one’s self and the habits inherited or incorporated by the  external world, a tool to explore the ability to be flexible and plastic even with a constraint.

Starting from the body, from movement, from the here and now, from one’s own feeling. Recompose a unity in an attempt to transform ourselves. A sort of hymn to well-being as individual and collective research, which escapes the dynamics of the imposition of society A sort of praise to slowness and feeling, in response to the individualistic neurosis to which we are slaves today.

The Feldenkrais® method invites to learn through the research for individual solutions through movement, and unlike other methods there is no one-size-fits-all solution/rule.
There is no single concept of Posture.

“We don’t teach a posture, we provide a place to learn and how to learn”

M.Feldenkrais

We can experience different ways of moving that make us discover that we have more choices available to us and that therefore we are not “destined to be so”, nor to adapt to a model that is imposed on us from the outside

To experience different options and alternatives, learn from mistakes; make subtle distinctions in the feelings experienced; create a progression of difficulty, from simple to complex; recognize the difference between an action done with effort or in a comfortable fluid and simple way; to shift continuously our internal attention between what is being done and how it is being done; but above all recognize the great function of the brain to integrate the stimuli of sensations and movement in a harmonious and coordinated whole. The most surprising thing is that this integration takes place respecting our needs, who we are and who we want to be.

“I believe that my experiences and teachings can help you to improve the way you live, just as they have helped me. You can perhaps learn to make your life more like what you want it to be. Your dreams, your aspirations can become more precise: and who knows, maybe they could even come true.”

M. Feldenkrais

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Furthermore, the method teaches us that to be alive and present means to accept our constantly changements in response to our internal needs and to the external context, a principle that we put in close correlation with DRAMATURGY.

DRAMMATURGY

T.Monk

DRAMATURGY is another of the modalities chosen by Arteria Mediterranea to interact with the world:

The work of  dramaturgy consists in conveying the balance between artist, medium, and society (narcissism/ self-referentiality / storytelling or instrumentalization of art), acting completely a the full service towards what it want to communicate

Dramaturgy  is Acting, not to express oneself in absolute and aesthetic terms, but thinking of the consequences that it wants to provoke; a dynamic space of negotiation and discussion between the stage and the writing, in the perspective of producing meaning through the research by and in the form

PRODUZIONI

Among the productions, co-productions and artistic support of Arteria Mediterranea : Ilinx (Circus and live music. 2012, by and with Vera Mor and Gianni Gebbia in co-production with Objet-a), Habits (Contemporary Circus. 2016, by and with Vera Mor), Blu Ottobre (Contemporary Dance.2018, by and with Maria Stella Pitarresi), Sauvage (Circus and live music. 2020, by and with Francesca Alberti and Alessandro Chemie), Dory (Circus. 2022, by and with Valeria Cultrera), Memento (Contemporary Dance. 2022, by Mariastella Pitarresi and Marco Pergallini)

COORDINATION AND ORGANIZATION OF ARTISTIC EVENTS

Among the activities produced by Arteria Mediterranea  there are also the coordination and organization of international artistic events in Palermo such as

  • “Mediterranean Aerial Camp” (2017)
  • “La Trilogie du Rire” by Micheline Vandepoel (2017/2018)
  • “Shangai.Eredità e Memoria”, sitespecific artistic residency directed by Firenza Guidi (2019).

ARTISTIC SUPERVISION, REGARD EXTÉRIEUR, TRAINING, RESIDENCIES

Arteria Mediterranea offers artistic consultancy related to dramaturgy, movement research and acrobatic technical training to professional circus artists and companies, and it offers as well as artistic residencies at its studio in Palermo, at “Atelier 12”

In 2019 it founded in Palermo with other associations and cultural operators, curators and artists, KAD (Kalsa Art District)

Links spettacoli

Habits

Ilinx

Broken